There was one night (at least) this season — Dec. 14, to be exact — when everything came together for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Movement melted off shoulders and fingertips without effort. Power emanated from the inside and then flowed out with searing swiftness, the rare sort that isn’t ostentatious. The men found strength in suppleness; the women were softer still, plush yet never weak.

The Ailey season wasn’t all like this. Plenty of evenings were a chore to get through. Programming — and not just the new works — was more at fault than the dancers.

But that special evening dedicated to showcasing the works of the choreographer Ronald K. Brown proved that he was the real star of the season — even though he didn’t, sadly, unveil a new dance. The air at City Center, where the Ailey company is in residence until Saturday, felt different that night. Radiating a sense of occasion that went beyond themselves, the dancers emanated pride — both for Mr. Brown’s connection with the company and for the way his presence has changed them as movers.

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Matthew Rushing in Ronald K. Brown’s “Ife/My Heart.”CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times

Their persistence in getting it right — even when the movement is robust, Mr. Brown’s blend of African and modern dance must roll off the body — was palpable. Before Mr. Brown came around, the tendency at Ailey was to punch out movement. He is their Jerome Robbins. That master choreographer would instruct dancers to calm down, to, as he might say, “take it easy, baby.” And like Robbins, Mr. Brown creates dances that expose intimacy within groups. It’s subtle, painstaking work.

Mr. Brown first began choreographing for the Ailey organization 20 years ago when Sylvia Waters, then the director of Ailey II, commissioned a dance. Since then, he has created five works for the main company, including “Grace” (1999) — his response to Ailey’s 1960 masterwork “Revelations” — and “Four Corners” (2013), a jewel of a dance in which seekers of enlightenment share the stage with four angels. Mr. Brown’s dances usually have a spiritual element, but it’s rarely heavy-handed; he imparts more of a sensation than a story. With a diaphanous quality that places it somewhere between heaven and earth, the piece is addictive in its slipperiness; it grows more appealing each season.

Angels haunt “Grace,” too. While Mr. Brown’s dances are explorations of spirituality, they’re also full of spirit with a pulse that sends bodies across the stage like brush strokes. Matthew Rushing was a quicksilver phenomenon in an excerpt from “Ife/My Heart” (2005) — has there ever been such a natural, silky dancer? And Linda Celeste Sims, front and center in three of the four pieces (actually, everything but “Ife”), brought her hypnotic phrasing to the choreography. Throughout the night, she displayed her mysterious way of splintering her body in two as if the upper half has floated away from the lower half, until, in a split second, they merge back together.

But all of the women in Mr. Brown’s dances inhabit a world in which they can be feminine and wholly independent. Along with Ms. Sims, Belen Pereyra, captivating all season, showed delicate fluidity in Mr. Brown’s “Open Doors” (2015), while Fana Tesfagiorgis was especially ethereal in “Four Corners.” And in “Grace,” which tells the story of lost souls finding the divine, it was as if all three were carried by the music.

The other find of the season was a new production of Ailey’s “Masekela Langage,” a simmering piece of dance-theater from 1969 that draws parallels between apartheid and the race violence in 1960s Chicago. Though it was of its time, “Masekela” managed to resonate in ways that the season’s new works — Kyle Abraham’s “Untitled America,” about the affect of the prison system on families, and Hope Boykin’s “r-Evolution, Dream.,” inspired by the speeches and sermons of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — did not.

Those premieres, for one thing, were heavy on voice-overs that made each, to varying degrees, pedantic and already stale. “Masekela,” set to music by the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela, was the opposite: With quiet, measured brutality, it was something of a tableau vivant coming to life as it told, through spurts of agitated movement and biting stillness, how violence and prejudice can make a place crumble and how despair and defiance go hand in hand.

Other programs had little momentum. A new production of Billy Wilson’s “The Winter in Lisbon,” a 1992 tribute to Dizzy Gillespie, was full of vamping and common in the worst Broadway sense. Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain Pas de Deux” came off as insipid — without the rest of the ballet, it loses whatever poignancy it might have; “Vespers,” by Ulysses Dove, and “The Hunt,” by the company’s artistic director, Robert Battle, were calculated in their shallow presentation of force.

Apart from Ailey’s work, it was troubling how much of the choreography was indistinct: pasted onto the dancers instead of embedded in them. That’s part of why Mr. Brown’s evening was so essential. In a pre-curtain chat for that program, Mr. Battle recalled that Mr. Brown had once told him: “You have two choices to be motivated by: love or fear,” and that Mr. Brown said, “I choose love.”